Émile Durkheim was one of the leading social theorists in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his work led to the establishment of sociology as a modern academic discipline. Western culture, particularly since the Enlightenment, developed an individualistic lens through which it understood matters of reason, faith, free will, and other aspects of human behavior and cognition. Durkheim’s work was valuable in illuminating the ways that the collective force of society could impress itself on individual thought and behavior. By viewing society as an entity that was more than the sum of its parts—a complex, structural system that stood over and acted upon the lives of individuals, rather than merely being constructed and influenced by individual actions—society was recognized as a proper object of study on its own merits.

In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim examined religion as a manifestation of the influence of society upon its individual members. He attributed to society a psychical force established by the collective consciousnesses of its members, which is reaffirmed and re-experienced in the context of communal religious rituals. This was a marked departure from the established ways of viewing religion in previous social theory, which had tended to be divided between traditionalist perspectives on the one hand, which allowed for the possibility of religion as the product of divine revelation or the experience of the supernatural, and skeptical modernist views on the other hand, which tended to disregard religion as fantasy and delusion.